refried.org

refried.org is now running on a Dell PowerEdge SC420. Did anyone notice the three hours of downtime? Hopefully you'll notice how much faster refried.org responds. I know I sure will. Read on for detail of the upgrade.

Refried.org was running on a Pentium 233 MMX with 256MB of RAM. I had a 2GB root drive and a 20GB home directory drive. I replaced it with a new Dell with a 2.53GHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive. Here is the procedure I used.

1. First I wanted to make sure I could get anything running on the Dell, so I booted up the Debian installer and did a test install. The default 2.4 kernel couldn't see the Serial ATA drive. I tried the 2.6 kernel on the installer and that worked fine.
2. I proceeded to do another install, this time partitioning the drive like so:
   • /boot on /dev/sda2
   • swap on /dev/sda3
   • /realroot on /dev/sda5
     This is where / will end up when I'm done
   • / on /dev/sda6
     This is a temporary root for upgrade purposes only
3. Once the system is running, I installed a few utilities like dump and xfsdump.
4. Power down the Dell and the old server. Replace the CD in the Dell with the 2 GB root disk from the old server.
5. Boot the Dell from the SATA drive.
6. Mount the old root drive and dump it to /realroot
7. chroot to /realroot to install kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686.
8. Fix up config files in /realroot so it's mounting /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda and using the tg3 network driver instead of 3c59x.
9. Reboot using /realroot as root to make sure that worked.
10. Power down everything again and plug in the 20 GB drive.
11. Remove the temporary root partition and repartition the drive to use LVM on the 153 GB that wasn't allocated yet. Then I made a 80GB logical volume for /home.
12. Copy everything from the 20 GB drive to the new 80 GB volume with xfsdump.
13. Power down, plug the CD drive back in, and boot back up.
14. Check that email works, then go to bed.